When encrypted The Signal communications app, launched nearly seven years ago, brought the promise of the strongest encryption to a simple interface for calling and texting. Now, Signal incorporates what it describes as a way to bring the same ease of use and security to a fundamentally different third feature: payments.
Today, Signal plans to announce that it will deploy the ability of some of its users to send money to its fast-growing encrypted communications network. To do so, it has built-in support for MobileCoin cryptocurrency, a form of digital cash designed to work efficiently on mobile devices, protecting users ’privacy and even their anonymity. For now, the payment feature will only be available to UK users and only for iOS and Android, not computers. However, the new feature represents an experiment to bring privacy-focused cryptocurrency to millions of users, which Signal hopes to expand around the world.
Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal and CEO of the nonprofit that runs it, describes the new payments feature as an attempt to extend Signal’s privacy protections to payments with the same experience that Signal has offered. for encrypted conversations. “There’s a palpable difference in the feeling of what it’s like to communicate through Signal, knowing that you’re not being watched or heard, compared to other communication platforms,” Marlinspike told WIRED in an interview. “I would like to reach a world where you can not only feel it when you talk to your therapist through Signal, but also when you pay your therapist for the session through Signal.”
Unlike payment features built into other messaging apps like WhatsApp or iMessage, which usually link a user’s bank account, Signal wants to provide a way to send money that anyone other than the sender and recipient can. observe or follow up. Financial institutions routinely sell their users ’private transaction data to marketing companies and advertisers or deliver it to law enforcement. Bitcoin wouldn’t do the trick either. As with many cryptocurrencies, their protections against fraud and counterfeiting are based on a distributed general ledger (a chain of blogs) that in many cases can reveal who sent money to whom.
So Signal looked at privacy-preserving cryptocurrency, or “privacy coins,” which banks evade and are specially designed to protect users ’identities and the details of their payments on a chain of blogs. While the more established privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, such as Zcash and Monero, have been more widely used and probably better tested, Marlinspike says Signal chose to integrate MobileCoin because it has the simplest user experience on mobile devices, which requires little storage space on your phone and only takes seconds to confirm transactions. In contrast, Zcash or Monero payments take minutes to complete transactions. “You’re using a state-of-the-art encrypted cryptocurrency, but from your perspective, it feels like Venmo,” says Josh Goldbard, founder of MobileCoin.
The choice of MobileCoin by Signal is no surprise to anyone watching the development of the cryptocurrency since its launch in late 2017. Marlinspike has been a paid technical advisor to the project since its inception and has worked with Goldbard to design MobileCoin mechanics with possible future integration into applications such as Signal in mind. (Marlinspike notes, however, that neither he nor Signal own MobileCoins).
MobileCoin only started trading as a real currency with real value in December last year — until then it functioned as a worthless “testnet”, and its 250 million coins, about $ 69 each, are now worth almost $ 17 billion in total. At the moment, it is on sale only on a cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, which does not allow transactions by US users, although Goldbard says there is no reason why US exchanges may not include commercial currency. . According to Marlinspike, Signal chose in part the integration of MobileCoin in the UK because the cryptocurrency cannot yet be purchased by users in the US, but also because it represents a smaller, English-speaking user base to test new payments. , which hopes to facilitate the diagnosis of problems.
Payments present a difficult dilemma for Signal: to keep pace with the features of other messaging apps, it must allow users to send money. But doing so without compromising your strict guarantees of privacy is a unique challenge. Despite the intentions of Marlinspike and MobileCoin, the use of any cryptocurrency today remains much more complex than the other features of Signal. Even if users can send MobileCoin back and forth, they will probably have to charge them in traditional currency to spend them, as MobileCoin is not widely accepted for real-world goods and services. And aside from this need for exchanges and the lack of availability in the United States, MobileCoin also remains more volatile than older cryptocurrencies, with constant price changes that will significantly change a user’s Signal portfolio balances. over days or even hours — almost the kind of issue Venmo users have to deal with. (Since March 27, MobileCoin’s value has risen nearly 600 percent, possibly due to rumors of imminent signal integration or possibly the result of a “short-squeeze”).